Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Sometimes you post even though you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, if only because you have more of them than the average voter.

With early voting upon us, I wanted to try to come to grips with the Williamson County Precinct 1 Commissioner’s race, where Lee Ann Seitsinger is challenging incumbent Lisa Birkman. The Seitsinger camp has a run a very active race, walking neighborhood and putting up a lot of signs, and have done several direct mailers, which suggests a fairly serious commitment to the race on their part.

And Seitsinger is certainly talking the conservative talk. On Friday, I sent three questions off to the Seitsinger campaign, and received a reply back yesterday. Questions in italics, answers in bold.

1. Do you support or oppose the EPA’s attempts to designate several Williamson County salamanders as endangered species?

Opposed. In fact, I’m opposed to the very existence of the EPA. The federal government has no business being involved in our local decisions.

2. Do you support or oppose attempts to make allow automatic payroll deductions for the Williamson County Employees Association?

Opposed. Employees should have to make the conscious decision every month to contribute. Otherwise the potential for abuse is great. It’s a bit like the withholding tax with the IRS. If we had to write a check quarterly to the IRS instead of having it automatically deducted from our paychecks, people would be marching in the streets and we’d finally get real IRS reform.

3. I’m having a hard time finding information out about you online. Can you point to evidence of your involvement in Republican politics prior to this election cycle?

I have not been involved in politics prior. I’ve been serving in the U.S. Navy and running a small business while raising a son. I’m just a conservative citizen who has watched our county debt grow to the point that we are the third most indebt county in all of Texas. My neighbors came to me and asked me to run, and so I did.

All solid, conservative answers. But for all of that, some things just don’t seem to add up.

For instances, her biggest blog supporters (and Birkman’s biggest detractors) seem to be Williamson County public employee representatives at http://blog.wilcoea.org/ and http://wilcowatchdog.org/. Those are constituencies that usually campaign and vote Democratic, and their biggest beef seems to be that Birkman has held the line on spending and not given them the raises they want.

Holly Hansen, who usually follows these things far more closely than I do, is not impressed with Seitsinger and is backing Birkman. Birkman has also been endorsed by House District 52 Rep. Larry Gonzalez, who’s a pretty good guy. By contrast, Seitsinger’s endorsements seem pretty heavy on public employee groups.

There also seems to be significant overlap between Seitsinger supporters and those supporting Jana Duty’s District Attorney run against John Bradley, another race I don’t have a firm grasp on (though I do know that Rick Perry has endorsed Bradley, which counts for something, even if I’m not taking Perry’s advice in the Senate race).

I poked around Seitsinger’s supporters, and found many Republicans (including a few vocal Ron Paul supporters), a number of realtors (her day job), a few Democrats, and a number of public employees groups.

For all those reasons I’m leaning toward Birkman. I wish I could come up with a more definitive judgment, but Google has a distinct paucity of information about Seitsinger.

I get the feeling this is going to be a very close race.